The Rescue Artist (27 page)

29
“Can I Interest You in a Rembrandt?”

C
harley Hill has dutifully absorbed endless such tales of “life as I see it.” Old acquaintances though he and Duddin are, neither man would believe for a minute that the other is his friend. Instead, the two are rivals in a complicated contest. The game is a free-form quest for information and advantage, and each man takes for granted that he has the other’s measure. With Duddin, Hill plays up his academic side and downplays his menace. For his part, the blustery old crook assumes without question that, as a man of the world, he is miles ahead of a scholar like Hill. He lards his stories with such remarks as, “Here’s another thing that I explained to Charley.”

Mary Duddin shares her husband’s disdain. “Do you know what we call Charley?” she asks, giggling as if she is being naughty. “Rumpole of the Bailey.”

As proud a man as Hill is, he knows better than to defend his record to the likes of Duddin. If crooks take him too lightly, so much the better. Over the years Hill has learned three key lessons from David Duddin. They are not the lessons Duddin meant to impart.

Lesson One: Everything starts with a brand-name. If a painting is to have value to a thief, the artist had better be instantly and universally recognizable. With rare exceptions, anyone more recent than Picasso is strictly for amateurs. Lesson Two: Thieves steal now and ask questions later. No one is as optimistic as a thief.
Something will turn up
. Lesson Three: Dollars trump everything. An enormously valuable painting is worth stealing by reason of its price tag alone. (Lesson 3 is the hardest for outsiders to grasp. By that reasoning, the baffled but honest citizen objects, the crown jewels would be worth stealing. A thief would agree, in a heartbeat. If the crown jewels were as easy to grab as an old master, they’d be gone tomorrow. In New York City, in the past decade, for example, thieves have stolen Stradivarius violins—far too famous ever to resell—on three occasions.)

For Charley Hill, who has considerable interest in psychology and next to none in logic, what matters is how thieves think, not whether their views hold together. He sums up the thief’s worldview with characteristic impatience. “The big-picture thefts are all motivated by bragging and stupidity The crooks just move the things around until some sap gets landed with them, like the last guy with a chain letter. The paintings will always have great intrinsic value, so the saps will always dream on.”

The Rembrandt story is a case in point. Duddin tells it as a sadly comic tale. Theft is the backdrop, but in Duddin’s eyes the story is less a crime saga than a charming tale of a rogue who took a chance. It didn’t pan out, but nobody was hurt and everyone had a good time. All a bit of fun, and of no deeper significance than a story about an ordinary Joe who somehow ran into a supermodel and, what the hell, asked her out.

The Rembrandt, by some accounts a portrait of the artist’s mother, was stolen in 1994 from Wilton House, a palatial home not far from Stone-henge, where it had hung since 1685. Wilton House and Rembrandt’s portrait belong to the seventeenth Earl of Pembroke; the first earl was a friend of Henry VIII who had the good fortune, when Henry confiscated the church’s property for his own uses, to be given a delectable tract of land and the abbey that stood on it.

As with so many stately homes in Britain, the very factors that make Wilton House remarkable—the size of the house, the immensity of the grounds, the distance from the nearest neighbors—make it a sitting duck for thieves. The Rembrandt vanished on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, traditionally celebrated with fireworks and bonfires. The thieves made good use of the distractions. “What I was told,” Duddin says, “is that it happened while the Earl of Pembroke and everyone else was at the bonfire. But the earl’s daughter went back to the house, and I’ve been told categorically that she walked straight past one of the burglars. He saw her, but she never saw him.”

The painting was insured for £400,000. Estimates of the amount it would bring at auction range up to £4 million, but the work is unsigned and may be merely School of Rembrandt. It depicts an old woman in a brown dress, sitting down, reading a book that lies open on her lap. Most of the painting is dark, though the book itself glows with light. “No one was more gifted [than Rembrandt] at turning old women into great art,” one historian remarks, but Duddin doesn’t go along.
The Granny
, as he refers to it, isn’t much. Duddin casts a proprietary eye around his own large house and says, “I certainly wouldn’t have it on me wall.”

Duddin has decided that the story is best told over a meal. He is not a picky eater (“after prison, everything is delicious”), and he orchestrates a trip into town, where he sweeps into a Chinese restaurant, commandeers a table, and orders a pitcher of beer and a plate of spare ribs to tide him over while he studies the menu.

“It began with someone I’d known for quite a while,” Duddin says. “How long was it, Mary, that we’d known Martin?” Martin was a mysterious character who entered Duddin’s life around 1990 and, for half a dozen years, brought him antique silver and antique clocks. “When he first came to me,” Duddin says, “he appeared to be a pukka businessman, dressed in a suit and tie, and the goods he was selling were properly presented, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t in a bag with ‘swag’ marked on it.”

Even so, something was off. “To be perfectly fair and honest”—Duddin drops the phrase into sentence after sentence with cheerful insincerity, like a magician saying “nothing up my sleeve”—”having dealt with him for a while, I began to have me suspicions. But what do you do, if you’ve dealt with somebody for several years and now suddenly you think he may not be straight? Do you take everything you’ve bought off him and try to give it to the police? Of course you don’t. I’d have lost a fortune, wouldn’t I?

“In the meantime,” Duddin goes on, “a diamond merchant that I used to deal with on a regular basis said to me one day, ‘Dave, do you know anybody who wants a Rembrandt?’ Literally like that.

“And I said, ‘Don’t be daft. I don’t know anything about Rembrandt,’ and just left it at that.”

Soon after, Martin turned up again. “Well, when Martin came to see me, it wasn’t unusual for me to belittle what he was bringing us, if you know what I mean. It’s just a means of getting it cheaper. So you rubbish it. He tells you something is wonderful, you tell him it isn’t, so it’s half the price, isn’t it? Nothing wrong in that.

“Anyhow, on this particular account, I was rubbishing what he’d brought, and his response was, ‘Do you ever get anything magnificent yourself?’

“And I said, ‘Well, there’s a Rembrandt, you know’

“And he said, ‘Honestly, a
Rembrandt?’

“I said, ‘Yeah.’ “

Duddin had walked into a police sting. Martin was a crook who had gotten himself in trouble; the police had offered to go easy on him in return for his cooperation. On Martin’s next visit, he offered to put Duddin in touch with a drug dealer who wanted the Rembrandt. (The story was that the dealer and his cronies had lined up an American buyer.)

Duddin doesn’t bother trying to cast himself as an innocent dragged into a dark alley where he would never have ventured on his own. “Now, if you like, knowing it was a Rembrandt, it couldn’t
not
be stolen,” he acknowledges cheerfully. “Not many people wander around with one under their arm, if you know what I mean.”

But
he
hadn’t dreamed up the theft or had anything to do with it. He was just a businessman, perhaps a little more enterprising than most, doing nothing more than greasing the wheels of commerce. “All I wanted was what I would call ‘a drink’ out of it—that would have been five hundred or a thousand quid for putting the different parties together.”

Having fallen into a hole, Duddin began digging it deeper. Word came from the drug dealer and his partners that, before they did the deal, they needed assurance that Duddin was as big a player as he claimed. “They suggested I get some decent quality things and they’d buy them,” Duddin says. “But they had to be cheap—that is, they had to be stolen.”

Duddin started working the phones. “I contacted people that I know in the trade. And I’m not talking about burglars or robbers or anything like that, I’m talking about bona fide people in the antiques trade, some of them with very, very nice, high-quality premises. I told them that I’ve got a buyer who’s interested in anything that’s good quality and cheap. And they all knew what I meant by that. They all understood what ‘It’s got to be cheap’ means. It’s bloody straightforward, isn’t it?”

The loot came rolling in. “There was a collection of pins that had been stolen in Cheshire, worth about £60,000,” says Duddin, “and a gold box that had been stolen from a local museum, worth about £20,000, and a collection of ivory from a private house, and three silver honeypots stolen from Floors Castle that were made by Paul Storr, who’s recognized as one of the finest silversmiths this country’s ever had, and a walking stick made from the sword that killed Captain Cook.”

Duddin puts down the spare rib he is holding in his surprisingly dainty hands. “You can imagine the pressure I was under, negotiating it all,” he says, as if even now he might collapse under the burden. Cyril Ritchard, playing Captain Hook, never delivered his lines with more gusto. And, he hints darkly, someone wanted to make sure there was no backing out. “In the middle of it all,” Duddin moans, “I got two phone calls threatening to shoot me missus and me little dog if I didn’t do the Rembrandt.”

Duddin gathers himself. “Now it’s fair to say that the judge entirely disregarded that. He didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t believe I felt threatened at all.” Duddin’s speech has grown slow and sad, as if he were dismayed by the cynicism of some people.

In the end, the police trap worked perfectly. While Duddin counted the £106,000 the “drug dealers” had paid him (they had negotiated a price of £70,000 for the Rembrandt, with £3000 to Duddin for his pains), the police swarmed in. “I had bags full of stuff,” Duddin recalls, “ivory and swords and whatever else, and then a van pulled in the drive to collect it and about ten policemen piled out. There were people on the roof of the garage, which is where me office is, there were people jumping over fences, and God knows where.”

He looks fondly at Mary. “You were back at the house, then, Mary, weren’t you?”

Mary, for once given a turn in the spotlight, gleefully fills in the picture. “I’d helped you to count the money, and I came back here and sat on the sofa, doing a crossword. And I looked out, and there were all these horrible men in the back garden, so I rushed to the front door, and there was this man there with a video camera and this horrible, scruffy, dirty woman, and she said, ‘Mrs. Duddin, you’re under arrest.’ “

Mary was released after two days. “I remember at the end,” she says, “the diamond dealer, Robert—it was Robert who told us about the Rembrandt in the first place—he turned to me and he said, ‘I
thought
it was too easy’ “

Cackling with laughter, Duddin and Mary signal to the waiter for another drink. For Duddin, the story had only one sad element, though admittedly it was the most important one. Duddin ended up before a judge who, for unfathomable reasons, decided to make an example of him and sentenced him to nine years in prison. (He was released after four and a half.)

Even today, his time served, Duddin is indignant. His beef is not with the conviction but with his sentence. This is a game played with rules, and the judge violated the code out of spite.

30
Traffic Stop

MAY 6, 1994

C
harley Hill had run out of patience. He had spent the early afternoon visiting galleries around Oslo with Einar-Tore Ulving, a man he had disliked from the moment they met. The point of the excursion, Hill hoped, was to kill time while Ulving’s colleague, Tor Johnsen, plotted strategy with the thieves who held
The Scream
. A few hours in Ulving’s company hadn’t done anything to improve Hill’s mood.

Then Ulving had wandered off, too, leaving Hill alone and more restless than ever. The phone finally rang. It was Ulving. Could they meet at Fornebu, the old airport south of the city?

Hill found Walker, and the two men briefed John Butler, in his command post, and set off for Fornebu. The two cops waited an hour, and then an hour and a half. Not a thing stirring. Afternoon gave way to evening. At last, Ulving turned up, ashen-faced and trembling. “The traffic police stopped me,” he said, “and they searched my car.”

Walker and Hill avoided looking at one another, but their hearts sank. What a thing to do!

The police had pulled Ulving over, they told him, for a random safety inspection. Did he have one of the triangular warning signs you put out on the road in case of an accident? It sounded farfetched, and, more unsettling still, the police seemed to be marking time, or perhaps waiting for instructions. Johnsen was in the car, too, and he was badly upset.

After fifteen minutes, Ulving had asked the policemen if they would be done soon.

“Yes, everything seems to be in order. But tell me, aren’t you an art dealer?”

Ulving said he was. The police asked if they could check his car. For forty-five minutes they searched but found nothing. They flipped through the box of art prints in the back of Ulving’s Mercedes, but somehow they missed the woodcuts of
The Scream
.

When the police finally finished, Johnsen told Ulving to go on to meet Hill and Walker without him. The way the Norwegian cops kept turning up had to be more than just coincidence.

Now Hill and Walker had a shaken Ulving to calm down. Hill guessed at what had happened—when he and Walker had told John Butler about the planned rendezvous at the old airport, the Norwegian police who were with Butler in his improvised headquarters had notified
their
bosses. They had immediately leapt to the conclusion that Ulving was headed toward Hill and Walker to show them
The Scream
. Following orders, the local cops had pulled Ulving over. When they failed to find the missing painting, they had sent him on his way.

Hill hid his exasperation with his Norwegian colleagues and tried to convince Ulving to laugh the whole thing off. The Getty wanted
The Scream;
it had no interest in running around the countryside playing cops and robbers.

“Well, it’s not your lucky day,” Hill told Ulving, “but it’s nothing whatever to do with us. First of all, I’d never be stupid enough to get involved with the police. And, second, it’s not my style of doing business.”

It wasn’t much of an argument, but apparently it didn’t have to be. Ulving wanted reassurance that Hill and Walker weren’t in cahoots with the cops, and Hill batted the suggestion away with convincing indignation.

Then, mission not accomplished, everyone headed irritably back to the hotel. (Hill and Walker could only guess what the airport meeting had been
intended
to accomplish.) Ulving went off to meet up with Johnsen, and Hill and Walker settled in for yet another debriefing with John Butler.

“Whatever you do,” Hill asked Butler, “can you call off the surveillance? They’re really causing us problems. I’m going to run out of excuses soon, to explain away that we’re nothing to do with all this.”

Butler, every bit as frustrated as Hill and Walker but not as free to act on his own, promised he’d do what he could. But there were limits. “It’s not our operation, it’s a Norwegian police operation,” Butler said. “They can do what they want. We’re just helping them.”

Hill retreated to his room, waiting for the phone to ring. The afternoon’s false start hadn’t dispelled his confidence. Johnsen had ogled the cash in Walker’s bag. He’d be back.

Hill flopped down on his bed, fully dressed except for his shoes, staring at the ceiling. It was nearly midnight. The phone rang. Ulving.

“We’re downstairs. We need you to meet us.”

“Why can’t it wait ‘til morning?”

“It’s got to be done now.”

“Go fuck yourself! I’ll talk to you in the morning.” Hill slammed down the phone.

Hill’s anger was fake. Crooks always made unreasonable demands. Assholes act like assholes. Do it their way, they’d say, or they’d burn the painting or cut it into pieces. And they might. The first thing was to persuade them not to act on their threats. Then, once they were done with that crap, you imposed your personality on them. You’re the guy who’s going to provide them with the money they want.

In negotiating with crooks, Hill had found that belligerence was key. Accommodation was always a mistake. “The minute you start agreeing with people, you’re finished,” Hill once observed, “because you can’t be credible then. That’s the way life works. Life is built around creative tension.”

It is difficult to know if Hill was talking about life in general or life in one dark corner of the world. He may not know himself. “Thieves and gangsters all hate each other, they screw each other, they betray each other,” he insists. “That’s the world they live in. And if you suddenly appear in it and agree to everything they say and do everything they want, then you’re just not credible. If you act agreeable, it’s not a sign you’re close to a deal. It’s a sign they should push harder. They’ll take you for some complete asshole.”

Hill sat on his bed, certain his phone would ring again in a minute or two. He didn’t phone Butler because he wanted to keep the line free. The phone rang.

“I’m serious,” Ulving said. “We need to get this done now.” “I’ve talked to you and Johnsen all day, off and on,” Hill said. “What more can anyone say?”

“No. It’s something else.”

“Okay. Do you want to meet in the coffee bar? But it may be closed by now.”

“No, no, not there. Outside, in the car.”

“Listen, I’m in bed,” Hill said. “The light’s out. Just give me a minute to throw some water on my face and get dressed. I’ll be down in ten minutes.” Hill phoned Butler, waking him up. “They’re downstairs,” he said. “Don’t go down there!”

“I’ve got to. Don’t worry, I won’t go anywhere with them. I’ll just go down dressed as I am now”—Hill was in tan chinos and a blue button-down shirt, wearing loafers but no socks—”and if they want to drive me somewhere, I’ll say, ‘I don’t have my coat or my socks, I’m not going outdoors.’ “

“All right, but you can’t leave the hotel.” “Okay.”

“And that includes going outside the hotel to sit in the car.” “Fine.”

Hill went downstairs and walked outside. There it was, Ulving’s Mercedes, with Ulving and Johnsen inside. Hill climbed in the back.